Academia ← Travis Holland

Finding a communication career in space through the SHSSP

Feb

19

2021

Tweet Australian higher education has arrived at a crossroads. The Government has set a policy direction which largely de-funds the humanities, including the field of Communication, in which I have thus far made my career. Additionally, the field appears imperilled by Ministerial interventions into research funding determinations, decisions taken by University managements in response to ...

‘They’ll Never Stop The Simpsons’

Nov

3

2016

Tweet Travis Holland, Charles Sturt University Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, will speak at the Sydney Opera House this weekend on the secrets of the show. Now in its 28th season, The Simpsons is one of the mostly widely lauded, and enduring series in TV history. But has it peaked creatively? Is it ...

Media Studies and the Struggle for Relevance

Nov

10

2015

Tweet I’m increasingly annoyed with media studies— a field I’ve devoted years to — and this is why. My plea for interventionist academics. My colleague Rob Carr (an historian) suggested on Facebook today that academics need to ask “how is my research going to benefit society, and will it benefit society as much as another research topic?” ...

A Capital On the Highlands

Nov

9

2015

Tweet Canberra, by Brendan Ashton on Flickr On Wednesday March 1, 1899, the town of Bowral and it’s neighbours in the Southern Highlands joined other contenders hoping to become Australia’s capital city. Moss Vale-based newspaper The Scrutineer records that “there was fairly good attendance, between 40 and 50 gentlemen being present, including residents of Mittagong, Bowral, ...

Why I Won’t Use TurnItIn to Check My PhD Thesis

Sep

27

2015

Tweet ‘A Belgian Politician’, by Flickr user Phillipe Put, illustrates a well-known Belgian plagiarism case I’m in the latter stages of preparing my PhD thesis for submission, and I’ve been told I have to submit the whole thesis through plagiarism-detection software turnitin. But I’m not intending to do that, and here’s why. Firstly, I received ...

Moving from Scrivener to Google Docs for Thesis Writing

Sep

25

2015

Tweet I’ve largely been using the very excellent Scrivener for my PhD thesis writing over the last few years. It’s a tool that makes a lot of sense for many types of workflows, including mine up until this point. Tweet

Springfield, A Hell of a Place

Sep

21

2015

Tweet Springfield, Springfield,it’s a hell of a town.The schoolyard’s upand the shopping mall’s down— Bart and Milhouse (Boy-Scoutz ‘n the Hood) Springfield, as seen in The Simpsons Movie. (image copyright Fox) The town of Springfield, USA, is one of the most recognisable fictional places ever created. Alongside the cavalcade of characters, Springfield has everything it ...

Saving Your Voice or Saving Theirs?

Sep

14

2015

Tweet Four of Australia’s regional television networks are urging viewers to campaign for changes to Australian media ownership laws which restrict their market penetration and dominance but they won’t come clean with audiences on what the changes could mean. The networks — Prime, WIN, Imparja and Southern Cross Austereo — feel imperiled by new media players including streaming apps ...

Thinking About the Hashtag

Aug

17

2015

Tweet It often takes time to recognise a new medium for what it is instead of the content it carries, especially when we’re thinking about the wrong medium. In the history of media studies, there has often been years of focus on the content of a medium before anyone starts to think about its broader social ...

The One Where They Go to New York

Aug

3

2015

Tweet New York City has always been a shimmering mirage of television, cinema, radio and newsprint. It only ever existed in ribbons of Seinfeld, Friends, The Simpsons, 30 Rock, Elf, and news coverage like that of September 11, 2001. Though this is an account of my personal mediascape, millions of others would have a similar ...